BCNE Appoints Josh Presley, a Ministry-Experienced Practitioner Who Loves Churches and Pastors, as Its Next Associate Executive Director
Ministry “success,” for Joshua Presley, is about encouraging others to be the best possible followers of Jesus Christ and the best possible leaders of a church they can become—the very approach he will bring on January 1 to a new assignment as Associate Executive Director of the Baptist Churches of New England.
“I’m a relational leader. I love to lead shoulder to shoulder with others and I try to help them excel. In my mind, I’m succeeding when others are excelling,” he commented during a telephone interview.
Presley sees this ministry philosophy lived out by Jesus Christ, who served his disciples and those he encountered “by sacrificing himself so that they can find life” (“. . . the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” [Matt 20:28, NIV]).
A New England Baptist since he unexpectedly moved to Maine fifteen years ago, Presley has been the lead pastor since October 2019 of Lakeside Community Church, Waterboro, ME. In that role he has been “shepherding the flock of God at Lakeside through vision and expositional preaching, as well as overseeing ministry teams” for maximum kingdom effectiveness.
Presley, who is 41, will begin working remotely from Maine until sometime in the summer when he and his wife, Kelsey, will relocate to Central Massachusetts after their two sons, Hudson, 10, and Holden, 5, complete their current school year. Until then, the Lakeside Waterboro members have asked him to stay on as one of four elders.
He will guide the BCNE leaders of key areas including church multiplication, planting, and revitalization for network of 388+ churches that stretches nearly 600 miles from its southernmost congregation in Greenwich, CT, near New York City, to Caribou, ME, near the Canadian border. The pastor, a native of Sweetwater, TN, will also manage the crucial disaster relief and leadership development teams.
“I am excited that Josh will be joining our BCNE leadership team. He has been deeply involved in the BCNE for over a decade. He revitalized a struggling rural church in Caribou and he served as pastor of a strong suburban church in Waterboro. Josh understands our New England culture and the needs of our churches, both large and small,” said Dr. Terry Dorsett, BCNE Executive Director.
“Josh has the right mix of visionary leadership and implementation skills that the BCNE needs at this moment in time. While he is young enough to have a long future in leadership in New England, he is old enough to have the experience and wisdom needed to provide leadership at the regional level,” the Executive Director added.
Hal Haller, the former Associate Executive Director, echoed Dorsett’s endorsement. “For some time now, I have known that Josh Presley was called by God to work and serve among the churches of the BCNE. It’s such a joy to know that his opportunity to serve on staff now exists!”
“In Josh,” he added, “New Englanders will find a hard-working, dependable, and ministry-experienced practitioner who loves churches, pastors, and desperately lost people who need Jesus.”
Haller, who joined the BCNE staff in October 2020, moved to St. Augustine, FL, in June to coach business executives and advance ministry causes in his home state. His wife, Sharon Haller, continues to work on staff as BCNE’s partnership director.
“There’s a lot I am excited about in this position. I’ll get to see more of New England. I'm also excited to work with our ethnic pastors and to meet a lot of the other pastors and church members in New England,” Presley stated.
Some six months after the Presleys were married, while still studying at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kelsey Presley’s aunt died in an automobile accident. They immediately moved to Northern Maine to help her uncle, who had just lost his wife, and his three young daughters.
Soon thereafter, Presley was invited to develop small groups, coordinate student ministry, and lead worship music as the associate pastor (2010-2012) of Calvary Baptist Church, Caribou. After just two years, he was selected as the lead pastor (2012-2019) of Calvary Caribou.
The church is the Southern Baptist’s most northern outpost, according to Merwyn Borders, who wrote the early history of New England Baptists. It is also one of the oldest SBC churches in New England, having been chartered in September 1963, twenty years before the Baptist Convention of New England commenced.
When he focused again on his seminary education back in North Carolina, Presley found that the requirements for a Master of Divinity had changed and he was still a few academic credits short of what would be needed for that degree, so he completed his studies there in December 2018 and graduated instead with a Master of Arts in Ministry Leadership.
Previously, Presley had graduated from Tennessee Wesleyan University, Athens, TN, with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a Human Resources concentration—both of which will be valuable for his BCNE staff leadership—and from Hiwassee College, Madisonville, TN, with an Associate of Science.
When comparing the years spent in rural church ministry with his forthcoming responsibilities on the BCNE staff, Presley said, “Some of it will be new territory for me and some of it will transcend the pastoral ministry, but I think there will be similarities.”
“My heartbeat for the churches,” he observed, “ is raising others up and trying to do so through sacrificial, servant leadership. I think it certainly is going to require ‘empowerment,’ and I use that word specifically—it’s not just delegation.”
A former customer-focused teller for TD Bank and a preschool information technologist in Presque Isle, while also pastoring bivocationally at Calvary Caribou, Presley noted that he enjoys being a preacher and an evangelist as much as he will savor the management and personnel aspects of his BCNE duties.
“We have trusted leaders who are overseeing multiple different areas of leadership,” he continued. “I’ve always thought [it important] to empower gifted leaders to accomplish the task that God’s called them to do. And my role, as I see it, is to equip them. I'm not anticipating it will be easy.” The associate directorship “is not something that I took lightly.”
When asked for a Bible passage that informs his current walk with Jesus as he approaches the associate directorship, Presley pondered several options before choosing 1 Peter 3:15, which challenges him to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. . . .”
Presley takes a trinitarian view of his pastoral ministry at Lakeside Waterboro and describes the church as a family of servants who serve as missionaries. The Christian life, he said, “comes from the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.”
A native of Waterboro, ME, and a multitasker who is passionate about her relationship with Jesus Christ, Kelsey Presley understands how to bring theology into the everyday life experiences of New Englanders. She studied Bible and English and graduated from Judson College at Southeastern.
She serves the BCNE as a member of its Baptist Foundation of New England Board of Trustees. “During my years in ministry in Maine, I [did not have] a great awareness of how the Baptist Foundation of New England could be a part of supporting my ministry.”
“Over the last year, as I have served on the BFNE board, I have been delighted to learn all the ways the foundation is serving churches and helping them fulfill the Great Commission,” she said for a BFNE $potlight story in May 2022 about the Maine Special Projects Fund.
Previously, Kelsey Presley was a BCNE Board of Directors member.
Josh Presley has been a member of the Maine Baptist Association’s administration team (2023-2024), for which he oversaw leadership development. The couple took part in association-sponsored mission trips to Mexico. Previously, he was a BCNE Board of Directors member (2020-2023), during which time he served on the administrative and the church-multiplication teams.
He heard the faint echo of God’s call to a lifetime of ministry at the age of 12 while lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and praying. He had committed his life to Christ four years earlier.
During those very early years of faith, Presley said he “never, never, never” imagined that one day he would serve churches in New England. He felt that if he grew up to become a pastor, it would be in Tennessee or at least somewhere else in the South.
During the last fifteen years in Maine, his perspective has shifted. “I really love New England and I really love how people are here. One of the challenges of ministry [in the South] is that everyone has a Christian ideology even if they’re not followers of Jesus,” he reflected on how the cultural Christianity in his hometown near Knoxville differs from the direct, or some would say blunt, approach to spiritual matters that many New Englanders adopt.
In Roman Catholic New England, any discussion of faith and Jesus is often considered a private matter best handled by a priest or a bartender. “Here people will generally tell you where they stand pretty quickly,” Presley, ever the relational leader, noted. “I really appreciate getting to know where someone stands, and then I can know how to apply the gospel to our conversation, or how to be a friend.”